


I'm Too Far Out to Sea

by JeannetteRankin



Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bad Parenting, Canon Compliant, Depression, Drinking, Drinking during Pregnancy, F/M, Parent-Child Relationship, Pre-Series, Pregnancy, good parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-20
Updated: 2015-06-20
Packaged: 2018-04-05 08:37:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4173207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeannetteRankin/pseuds/JeannetteRankin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For <a href="http://daredevilkink.dreamwidth.org/1742.html?thread=3258062#cmt3258062">a daredevil kinkmeme prompt</a> requesting Jack Murdock-centric fic. This is the story of how Jack met Maggie, and how little Matty came into their lives. It's a love story, but there's only one way it was ever going to end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'm Too Far Out to Sea

**Author's Note:**

> This story contains scenes of a pregnant person drinking alcohol. During this time period, the dangers of alcohol consumption during gestation were not as widely-known as they are today, and drinking during pregnancy was not the taboo that it has since become. Needless to say, it is not a good idea to drink while you are pregnant.
> 
> Title from R.E.M.'s _(Don't Go Back To) Rockville_

When Jack met Maggie, he was an up-and-coming 23-year-old hotshot and Maggie was the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen. She had this auburn hair that swung around her chin, and these green eyes that would catch you and hold you tight until she was damn ready to let you go.

The first time he ever sees her is in a bar. He's celebrating yesterday's victory and, yeah, maybe a few drinks in. He's laughing with his buddies; Earl keeps buying him drinks and slapping him on the back, and he's having a good night, a real good night. Suddenly, Earl goes quiet and kind of nudges him, then tilts his chin toward the far side of the room.

Jack turns around and sees her. She's got this red stripey dress on, hugging her every curve, and her big dangly earrings sparkle in the yellow light. Her hips are swaying as she walks across the dingy bar like it's a stage. It's like the whole bar goes into black and white, and she's the online thing in living color.

And she walks right up to him. “Hiya,” he says, and clears his throat.

“You're Jack Murdock, right? The boxer,” she says, voice like a purr.

“Yes, ma'am.”

“I saw your fight,” and her eyes shine with excitement. “You were amazing.”

“Thanks.” He wishes he could come up with something to say that might impress a girl like her.

“Take me home,” she says. “I wanna fuck your brains out.”

“Yes, ma'am.” Jack Murdock might not be the sharpest boy in Midtown, but he's no fool.

She just about does fuck his brains out. She's fiery, ripping his clothes off and pushing him onto the bed. She has the most perfect breasts he's ever seen, and she rides him like she's up for a rodeo title. The next morning, she makes him take her out for pancakes and smirks at him the whole time, one foot running up and down his leg under the table.

Maggie's magic. Absolutely magic.

She makes him listen to all kinds of weird music she brings home from the record store where she works, but he doesn't really mind. He even kind of likes those R.E.M. guys. Maggie likes the same kind of movies Jack does and the same kind of beer. When he finds out she's only eighteen, a fact she mentions with one arched eyebrow raising and a challenging smirk on her lips, he figures, well, it's not like he wasn't going to Hell anyway. Might as well earn it.

She comes to his matches and screams the loudest. When he looses to that prick Ludo, she cleans up his cuts and gives him a long blow job, and he falls asleep with her in his arms and his last thought before drifting off is  _shit, I'm in love with this girl._

And okay, she's definitely not perfect. She likes things just a certain way, and she always has to have the attention of everyone in the room, and she gets impatient with people sometimes. But God knows he's no angel, either. When they do argue it's usually his fault, and he's usually the one apologizing. Good thing she's good at accepting apologies.

“I'm a simple girl,” she says when he tells her this. “Some flowers, liquor, oral sex... I can forgive just about anything.”

“Yes, ma'am,” he says, kissing into her smile.

The worst argument they ever have happens about two minutes after she tells him she's pregnant. It's not over the baby. As soon as he finds out the baby exists, his heart just about pounds out of his chest with a feeling half fear, half joy. Tears prickling his eyes, Jack gets down on one knee.

“Maggie,” he says, taking her hand, and dumbass that he is, not noticing the expression on her face, “I love you, more than anything in the world. You're the most amazing woman I've ever met, and I'm gonna do my best to be a good father to our baby. Will you marry me?” It's a question, but it doesn't sound like one when it comes out of his mouth. He feels a swelling sense of the inevitable; she's the one he's been waiting for all his life, and now, they're going to have a baby and he never pictured himself as a dad, but with her? With her it can all work. It'll be perfect.

“Oh, Jack,” she says, biting her lip. “No.”

It takes a second to sink in. “No?”

“No, I won't marry you.”

He thinks she joking at first, a shitty joke, but she makes those sometimes. She's not. He thinks it's because he doesn't have a ring, didn't ask her properly. That's not it either. For one brief second when the world drops out from under him, he thinks it's because she doesn't want to have the baby.

“I'm having this baby,” she grits out, temper sparking behind her eyes. “That doesn't mean I have to shackle myself to you.”

The things that get said after that are some of the worst that Jack's ever said to anyone, and she gives even worse back to him. When she storms out of the apartment, slamming the door behind her, Jack grabs the bourbon off the shelf and slumps down into a seat, wondering if he just ruined the best thing he ever had.

He sits in the chair, with the bottle, for hours, until after sunset. He doesn't even look up when he hears her footsteps on the stairs, when she unlocks the door.

She lightly crosses to where he's sitting, nabs the bottle from his hand, and takes a long swallow. He still doesn't meet her eyes.

One of her hands, long-fingered and graceful, with neat blue-green nail polish, comes up under his chin and gently raises his head.

Maggie looks awful. Her eyes are red and face blotchy like she's been crying for hours. Jack feels about two inches tall. He made her cry. She's one of the toughest people he's ever met, and he did that to her. He can't think of one thing to say.

“It's not because I don't love you, dumb dumb,” she says, as if they were having the conversation this whole time. She cradles his head in both hands gently and leans in, placing a kiss like a benediction on his forehead. His eyes fall shut.

She seats herself in his lap and they trade swigs of the bottle back and forth, and after a little while, she starts to talk. She tells him about watching her parents' marriage fall apart and how she swore that would never happen to her; she never wanted to make another person that miserable.

“I love you,” she tells him, resting her head on his shoulder. He squeezes her around the waist, wanting to keep her close. “I wanna be with you. I'm just not ready to marry you.”

They stay up all night talking, and Jack can't bear to let her go even when they eventually slide into sleep around dawn.

She moves in, and re-paints the kitchen, and wedges a bookshelf into the front room for her record collection. Jack just watches with pride as belly grows, and holds her close at night, as often as she'll let him, one hand curled around her protectively.

Jack expects it to be hard when the baby comes. That's what everyone's been telling him. “Oh, the first year with a baby is the hardest thing you'll ever do, boyo,” from one of the trainers at the gym.

“And her only nineteen and no sisters around to help? Tsk,” Rhonda at the diner says. “You'll be in for it. I hope you're not planning on sleeping for a year—either of you.”

But it wasn't like that. Little Matty was a perfect baby.

“All dads think their baby is perfect,” Maggie tells him, smiling. She's cradling the baby in her arms and Jack just wants to sit there and stroke his little cheek with one finger all day long.

“Yeah, but he really is,” Jack tells her, awed. She laughs and kisses him.

Matty's a good sleeper, almost from right off the bat. He doesn't cry much, and when he does, all Jack has to do is pick him up and bounce him on his knee, or hold him and pat him on the back, and he quiets right down. He has the tiniest little baby hands and he looks at Jack with his big round eyes like Jack is the best, most fascinating thing on God's green earth.

So forget all the neighborhood busy bodies telling him a baby was gonna ruin their lives. And fuck everyone who kept asking why they aren't married yet. He's working harder than he ever has in his life, training like a madman and picking up extra work in every spare hour he has to keep them afloat while Maggie is still at home with the baby. But it isn't hard. It isn't hard at all.

Because every night he gets to come home to the most beautiful, amazing girlfriend, and the happiest, smiling chubby baby, and they adore him. Jack Murdock never thought he could have it this good.

The hard part comes later.

Jack comes home one day and hears the baby crying before he even gets in the door.

Matty is sitting up on the rug in the front room, tears streaming down his cheeks, face scrunched up and red.

“Hey, hey,” he says, bending to pick him up. Jack swings him up in his arms and gives him a big kiss on the cheek. “Okay there, little man? Where's that gorgeous mother of yours at?”

“Mama,” Matty says. His tears are subsiding already, and he's clinging to Jack with all the strength in his little arms.

Jack finds Maggie lying in bed, dozing, still in her sleep clothes.

“You been in bed the whole day?” he asks. It's not like Maggie to lie around in the middle of the day. And she had to have heard Matty crying. “You're not gettin sick, are you?” he goes to put his hand on her forehead, but she brushes him away.

“Looking after that baby all day is exhausting. Don't I deserve to take a break?” There's a note in her voice, something sharp and jagged that doesn't sound like the Maggie he knows. But she's tired, and it's true, she works hard.

“Of course you do,” he tells her, leaning in and kissing her on the forehead. He takes Matty away, gives him a bath, and when he eventually comes to bed, she's deeply asleep.

The next day she seems better, and Jack figures it was just the pressure of being back at work and everything. He writes it off.

But then it happens again. And again. Maggie's eyes go dull, even around little Matty. She snaps at him, at both of them, in ways she never used to. She misses work, can't get out of bed. Jack has never felt so helpless.

He's running himself ragged, trying to take care of Matty, and work, and do all the stuff that Maggie would normally do, and he just wants her back. Some days she seems pretty okay, playing with the baby, shopping for groceries, but it never lasts long. She always fades away again, to that place where Jack can't reach her. He knows, deep down in his bones, that whatever's happening isn't her fault. He just doesn't know how much more he can take.

“Maggie?” he asks, softly, coming into the bedroom one night after Matty is down in his crib. He sits on the bed next to where she's lying. Her eyes are open, but she's not looking at him. He strokes her unwashed hair back from her forehead. “You wanna take a shower and maybe eat something?” he asks. She's so thin, like she's fading away from him.

Maggie only shakes her head, faintly.

“You gotta eat something, Honey,” he tells her.

“Later,” is all she says, her voice listless. She shrugs away from him and turns on her side, pulling her dressing gown tight around her shoulders and facing away from him. He can see her shoulder blades through the thin material, looking sharp enough to cut.

“Honey, we gotta talk about this.” Jack's voice is not too steady, but he takes a deep breath. If he can only say it to her back, he's still gotta say it. “You're not doing good right now.” He waits, but she makes no reply, only hunches further into herself. “I'm gonna find a doctor, and we're going to make an appointment for you, okay?” As soon as he says it he feels a weight lift off his chest. One of the weights, anyway. There's still about forty more on there, but having said it, getting it out in the open, is one less.

Maggie mutters something. He can't hear what it is, but he just says, “we'll talk about it tomorrow, okay?” He waits for a moment, but she doesn't say anything else. Hesitantly, he touches her shoulder, just briefly, just to make sure she's still there.

The next day, Jack's got an early shift doing construction. Afterward he picks Matty up from his mom's place and heads directly to the gym. The boys have gotten used to seeing him come in with the baby. Someone even dug up a highchair from somewhere, where Matty can sit and see the ring and the training floor. He loves it.

It's a good day's workout, after a long shift, and when Jack comes home, thinking of Maggie and how he's gonna make sure she gets better, he's feeling better than he has in a while.

“Hey, beautiful, you up?” he calls, coming through the door with Matty on one arm, gym bag and workboots slung over the other shoulder. She doesn't answer, so he leaves the baby to play and goes into the bedroom. She's not there. 

He checks every room in the house, his heart turning to ice.

He spots it on the kitchen table. A ragged piece of paper with Maggie's loopy writing on it. Hand shaking, he picks it up and reads.

_Sorry, Jack. Had to get out of here. I'm no good for anything right now, I've got to get away for a bit. I love you. I'll call when I can. Take care of Matty. -M_

“Mama?” Matty asks. Jack's throat closes up with tears. “Mama?” the baby asks again, more insistently. Jack crumples up the note and stuffs it in his pocket. 

“Sorry, little man,” he tells him, voice rough and low. “Mama's not going to be around for a while.”

 


End file.
